Blue Valentine

So that brings us to Blue Valentine. This movie was widely acclaimed as one of the best of 2010. The story is simple. It’s about the breakdown of a marriage. I’m told that it’s a little depressing, but I am never depressed by a well-made, provocative, and artful film. Cindy (Michelle Williams), is bright, pretty, and has dreams of going to medical school. Dean (Ryan Gosling) is a high school dropout whose mother split when he was young, and who now works for a moving company. You’re beginning to get the picture? They’re kind of mismatched, but they meet, have a romantic interlude, she dances and he plays the ukulele, and through pregnancy and destiny, they end up together. We get glimpses of the couple during various phases of their relationship – the film is edited with cross cutting over time periods, and in this way, the viewer understands their back story without the typical chronological order of most narratives. Credit Jim Helton, along with the other editor, Ron Patane, for not only making this style work, but for also enhancing how the story unfolds.

Both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams got multiple award nominations, and Michelle got the Oscar nod. I really think that Ryan’s contribution to this film was equal to that of Michelle. His Dean is a familiar character – he’s playful, loyal, very boyish, and he drinks and smokes too much. A very telling line in the movie comes when Cindy, frustrated with what she perceives as Dean’s lack of ambition, asks him if he doesn’t ever think about having a job where he doesn’t have to drink at 8 am. Dean retorts that the fact that he can drink at 8 am is actually a great “benefit” of his painting job. He is hugely devoted to their daughter, Frankie, and he’s the kind of guy that cries over the loss of a dog, and bonds immediately with the other guys at work. Ryan totally inhabits this character. It’s a pleasure to watch him. He’s an actor with great range, and we have seen that he was as effective in Lars and the Real Girl as he was in Half Nelson. He imbues Dean with a soft vulnerability that is somehow and magically melded seamlessly with his blue-collar sensibility. We’re not given a tremendous amount of detail about how their love devolves. This is really my one gripe with the movie: not quite enough linkage of how the couple went from spark to lights out. I could have used more proof about why Cindy was over Dean, because in spite of his flaws, I romanticized him and was rooting for him. Of course, I didn’t have to live with him. But instead, Michelle delivers an achingly delicate, subtly breathtaking performance, totally complex in its simplicity and not readily definable. Her turn as Wendy in Wendy and Lucy could draw a comparison, but here, in Blue Valentine, she’s even more like a painting that invites interpretation.

Add great music (you’ll know Grizzly Bear after this film) and some great sets – bridges, buses, store entrances, and the best one: the Future Room in a cheapo motel where Dean hopes to reach back to the love and the sex that attracted them at first. And speaking of sex, there are a couple of somewhat graphic scenes—graphic enough to warrant the threat of an NC-17 rating, which was eventually and thankfully overturned in favor of an R rating.

There’s so much more. We see the portrayal of family relationships, a chance encounter between Cindy and her old boyfriend, the smarmy doctor offering Cindy a new “position”, and the initial meeting point of Cindy and Dean—Cindy visiting her grandma in a retirement home while Dean is moving in an elderly gentleman. This is one of the most poignant scenes of the film. I could go on and on, but before a spoiler occurs here, I’ll just say a big “See it”, and think of Derek behind the counter years ago at Video Station. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Romance

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 5/10/11

Director Kelly Reichardt‘s previous film, Old Joy, which starred indie hillbilly Will Oldham, had a loose, almost improvisational feel to it as it embraced a sort of stillness in mood and emotion that, to some, made it feel almost inert. Wendy and Lucy shares some of those qualities, but is elevated beyond what could have easily been standard indie fare by a wonderful performance by Michelle Williams, who has quietly shown herself to be a very talented actress when given the opportunity. It is Williams, and to a lesser degree her two prominent co-stars, character actor Wally Dalton and newcomer Lucy the Dog, who instill in the film a decidedly naturalistic tone, sparing us all the usual emoting or actorly histrionics that tend to drag down films of this type, whether it be the indier-than-thou ‘mumblecore’ of Joe Swanberg, or even some of Gus Van Sant‘s tidier messes.

Williams stars as Wendy, a young woman whom we first encounter walking through the woods in Oregon with her beloved dog, Lucy. In these woods, she comes across a group of travelers gathered around a bonfire. A mixture of runaways and roustabouts, it is in her nervous conversations with them where we learn what little of Wendy’s life that we will ever learn: she is alone, and traveling to Alaska from her home in Indiana. Why, we don’t know. We can assume that something has gone awry in her life, but the explicitness in which we are not told this is what makes this film so special. It would only detract from the story, and color our impressions of her before the film has even gotten underway. It is an overriding theme to the story that tragedies can take any form, no matter how small.

We do know that she is sleeping in her car as she travels, and when a security guard in the Walgreen’s parking lot rouses her, her troubles take shape. The guard, played in a kindly performance by Dalton, helps her push her car out of the lot, and when she tries to drive away Wendy discovers that it won’t start. The nearest garage is closed, so she must get through another day unsure of what lays ahead. Careful not to spend too much of the few hundred dollars she has, she goes to a nearby grocery store to get some food for Lucy, who she ties up outside of the store. She gets caught shoplifting, and is taken away by the police, stranding Lucy on her leash. When she finally gets out, after paying a fine, she returns to the store to find her dog has vanished. Distraught, she spends the rest of the movie trying to find her.

While much of this may seem very slight, and I suppose that it is, the marvel of the film is the character studies that it offers us. Williams gives such a controlled performance as Wendy, a young woman whose expression rarely changes even as things get more and more upsetting, that when she does break down, even briefly, it is all the more affecting. It is written all the time about characters that are ‘just like us’, but here, that trope proves true, as Wendy could be just anybody you see walking down the street, a rucksack over her shoulder, being led by a dog on a leash. Her problems are not extraordinary, and her tragedies not unfamiliar; but it is the situation in which they occur, when she needs so little to go right to get by, that when a broken-down car or a lost dog do happen, it can feel much more heartbreaking than any of the usual storytelling clichés you would logically expect in a film like this. There are no stalkers in the woods; she isn’t forced to degrade herself to get by. People help when they can, but they can only do so much. She doesn’t expect anything else, and neither should we. This is how the world works.

Reichardt has proven to be a director of rare abilities. Not only a student of film, but a teacher (she is an instructor at Bard College in Oregon), Reichardt uses the sort of long tracking shots, extended takes, unsparing close-ups and quiet, uncluttered sound (the only ‘soundtrack’ is of Wendy occasionally humming a few bars of a tune to herself) that was once the hallmark of the best directors but is so rare now that it actually seems new again. More than anyone, her films remind me of the best work of Monte Hellman, a wonderful director whose work in the 1970′s included two films that seem to be a blueprint for this: Cockfighter and Two Lane Blacktop. Both quiet, at times almost silent, works, which featured the great Warren Oates, these films also dealt with people who were drifting across the U.S. for reasons we, and likely they, were never certain. While some people may, and undoubtedly will, complain that this movie isn’t ‘about anything’, they are, and will forever remain, wrong. There are innumerable stories being told in Wendy and Lucy. You just have to know how to look for them. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R